On a day when President-Elect Donald Trump did yet more tweets blasting stories about him and Russia and U.S. “intelligence” (he put the word in quotes go HERE then HERE), the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee announced it will hold hearings to investigate possible Trump-Russia links. Two other pieces fit into this context: 1)House Democrats were “outraged” after closed door hearings with FBI Director James Comey, with one charging he was unfit to lead the agency, 2) The Justice Department’s inspector general will investigate pre-election actions by department and FBI.
The committee’s announcement is significant because it intends to call witnesses from the Obama administration, and both political campaigns. And there now seems to be agreement on both sides in the Senate that this kind of investigation must be done:
Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said late Friday that his committee would investigate possible contacts between Donald
Trump’s campaign and Russia, reversing himself one day after telling reporters that the issue would be outside of his panel’s ongoing probe into Moscow’s election-disruption efforts.
Burr and the intelligence panel’s top Democrat, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, said in a joint statement that the committee’s probe would touch on “intelligence regarding links between Russia and individuals associated with political campaigns” as well as Russian cyberattacks and other election meddling outlined in an intelligence report released last week.
The committee will use “subpoenas if necessary” to secure testimony from Obama administration officials as well as Trump’s team, Burr and Warner said.
It’s clear Comey’s performance (or non-performance) may have been a factor:
The bipartisan Senate announcement came hours after several House Democrats aired their frustrations with FBI Director James Comey following a classified briefing on Russian election disruption. The Democrats were livid that Comey declined to confirm whether he is conducting an inquiry into potential Trump ties to Russia, The Guardian reported — a question that he publicly declined to answer earlier this week.
Burr said late Thursday that he did not plan to touch on possible contacts between Trump emissaries and Russia, asserting that the issue likely falls under the FBI’s purview. “We don’t have anything to do with political campaigns,” the Republican said.
The joint announcement from Burr and Warner commits the intelligence panel not only to probing possible Trump-Russia ties, but also to releasing “both classified and unclassified reports” with its conclusions and holding some open hearings. However, “the bulk of the committee’s business” during the investigation will be tackled in private, the senators said.
Top Democrats and Republicans are pledging to make this a serious, bipartisan investigation.
Expect many many more angry Trump tweets on this issue. But this isn’t an issue that just has tweet wings.
It has legs.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.